Thursday, November 7, 2013

What I'm Hoping For From Blizzcon

Tomorrow is the official start of Blizzcon. People are already starting to line up outside the convention center. The Sha of Happiness and AngryOrc have already been spotted together in public. It's quite a commotion already.

There's been a lot of traffic in the blogosphere over the last few weeks over what folks are wanting to see out of this Blizzcon, and out of the presumed announcements for the next expansion, fueled even more by the discovery that Blizzard had trademarked "Warlords of Draenor." So I thought I'd add my two cents worth, overpriced though that may be.

One thing that I'm pretty convinced of, is that regardless of the actual geographic setting, what we are likely to get is lots of really gorgeous, interesting new content, new quests, new dungeons, new raids and likely other new shinies. Whether it's going to be 10 levels or 5, I'm honestly not sure I care, because I'm assuming that Blizzard will be shooting for about the same amount of time to get to the next max level, regardless of the numbers in between - likely around 24 hours played.

Will there be new races, or new classes? I'm honestly not sure I care. Unless we further expand the character slots on each realm, I don't have room for another character in the existing Joar empire, which would lead me to having to make some hard choices. We seem to be in the mode of introducing a new class every other expansion, which would seem to weigh towards no new class this time. Given that, there will probably be two.

Don't get me wrong, if there are new races or classes, I'll be jumping right in, but it's not something that's going to drive me toward participating in the new expansion.

Most of what I'd like to see in the next expansion are really pretty minor game mechanic type items, so here they are:

The ability to send BoA items cross server.

Solutions to the bank and bag space issue. More bank tabs, bigger bags, more void storage, and a system for storing tabards, similar to the key chain of old.

A new primary profession. It's been too long since we've had a new one.

It would also be nice to give players the ability to do quick catch ups on professions similar to the way they handled cooking in this expansion.

The ability to run old content at scaled down gear levels to give the feel of doing it at level.

So those are my hopes. Pretty minor compared to some of the other things being thrown around, but I'm generally pretty OK with new and exciting stuff no matter what. Even ended up getting into pet battles even though I swore I wouldn't.